Toward a reflexive mathematics education within local and global relations: Thinking from critical scholarship on mathematics education within the sociopolitical, global citizenship education and decoloniality

Abstract

Education commonly is positioned as central to developing citizens who can address so-called global challenges. Responses are identifiable in global citizenship education, which may recruit mathematics into interdisciplinary relationships, and within mathematics education itself. However, if notions of the global and local, the citizen, mathematics, and mathematics education, are brought together uncritically, responses may inadvertently reproduce the inequities they seek to disrupt. In this conceptual article, we interrogate how and with what implications these notions are given meaning in mathematics education. We also think toward notions of place, subjectivity, relations, mathematics, and mathematics education, in a way that recognises power and differences that matter, without one place being synonymous with the universal, and one peoples considered superior. We articulate these ideas in questions for provoking scholar-practitioners’ critical, reflexive thinking. For our contribution, we think from critical scholarship on mathematics education within the sociopolitical, global citizenship education and decoloniality.